WoW was designed this way from the very getgo. If you don't remember, this was the big 'thing' about WoW that made UO and EQ players go "What do you mean I only have to run back to my body when I die?". It was blasted as a game for casuals from before the game even launched, anyone who argues that the game became casual is just kidding themselves.

There was a game were they could kill you and collect YOUR GEAR?
...if that's the way it was, I'm glad things in WoW don't have consequences.

Yes. Ultima Online (among others apparently) was an absolute bloodbath....particularly as a new player, where you would be farmed in the starting zones because your murderer could loot your lowbie gear and sell it for money. Aside from all the things that motivate those types of players to begin with, it was steady cash flow. Can't remember how many times I logged in, tried to start out, and ended up logging back out.

Ultimately I decided the subscription wasn't worth the grief and went on to play some other game. Meridian 59 maybe, hell if I remember now.

Anyway, as others have said WoW was always more "forgiving" than other games in those regards, and I think that was a key factor in its early success.

OK I understand maybe not wanting stuff like an EXP loss or loss of gear. That is mostly due to the way gear works in WoW. The reason it did work in a game like UO is because gear was very easy to get and most of it was player crafted. Obviously if you spent 4 months or more getting geared it would be stupid to have something in game where you could get DCed and lose everything.

But why is there no consequences for the social aspect of the game? I remember some guy raging for an entire BG once. He told people they failed at life. They should go kill themselves. I think he used every possible swear word in the same sentence. What happened? Nothing because I had him in the same BG again a few days later and he was still saying the same stuff. Thats just unacceptable. If people go into dungeons and are bad nothing happens. If you are an asshole or are a bad then why should the community be able to do something about it? Yes I know I could just put them on ignore but why should they still continue to take part in the game? There should be a penalty for trying to be bad or rude on purpose.

Before the age of the LFD / LFR (Vanilla to very early WoTLK) and so on, you had to behave yourself on your server or you became a pariah of the server and no one would run anything with you word would spread very fast about who not to run with. And in the end the only way to get away from it was either stop playing or move to another server. Now with LFG everything and name changing and what not the pariah factor is a lot less than it once was..

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Originally Posted by shoc

WoW was designed this way from the very getgo. If you don't remember, this was the big 'thing' about WoW that made UO and EQ players go "What do you mean I only have to run back to my body when I die?". It was blasted as a game for casuals from before the game even launched, anyone who argues that the game became casual is just kidding themselves.

Yeah I remember that how the UO and EQ players hated on WoW so much because it was a more forgiving MMO. Most of the later and upcoming games go the WoW route with the exception of EVE which I have been told is like the WO and EQ of old in terms of losing precious items and having to start from scratch all over again.. Even D3 has that in Nightmare mode once you die ya have to start all over again..

WoW was designed this way from the very getgo. If you don't remember, this was the big 'thing' about WoW that made UO and EQ players go "What do you mean I only have to run back to my body when I die?". It was blasted as a game for casuals from before the game even launched, anyone who argues that the game became casual is just kidding themselves.

This. WoW became successful as a casual game. Hardcore games where your gear drops, you risk losing everything if you die, where factions play a major part in where you can and cannot go, etc. Those games all exist. They are not ultra successful. WoW is.

Because it's a game, not real life. If you can't distinguish between the two...

My point is the game is supposed to be fun and not at all realistic. Consequences are not fun, otherwise they wouldn't be consequences. If you want to take your concept further, all characters in WoW should be hardcore, as in deleted as soon as you die. How likely would you be to raid if your character was deleted after one wipe? Those particular consequences primarily cause people to have to spend more time in old level-up content, which means that fewer people can raid, meaning that they can drag out the length of raid tiers far more. Why would they need to create a new tier when most of the people who have cleared it have died and restarted already? You'd have a hard time gearing up for the next tier when you could be set back to zero on any attempt. Plus it would mean that they'd have to tune down the chances of you dying, ie the chances of you failing, making the game easier.

TL;DR: Consequences aren't fun, therefore they don't belong in a thing designed to be fun.

Critics and gamers alike celebrated World of Warcraft as a triumph in MMO gaming, and the reasons for this were manifold. Previous MMOs contained mechanics seemingly designed to punish gamers; WoW did away with these. By eliminating or minimizing pointless penalties, skillfully tutorializing, and adding quests into the game to make it more casual-gamer-friendly, Blizzard exponentially multiplied the appeal of the game.

It's the key to the success of WoW that they chose not to punish players that make mistakes but just do not reward them and give rewards to those who do the right thing. There is no need to punish someone who failed doing something. Not getting the reward he wanted is punishment enough.

Whenever I read a reply to me that starts with, "So what you're saying is..." -- and I've read so, so many -- my first thought is,
"What I'm saying is what I'm saying, otherwise I would've said something else."

Well, it doesn't really work like that at all. Consequences to decisions, as well as failure of a given task or attempt at a task, are what makes a game like this interesting. Which is one of the reasons that every time a decision point is effectively removed from the player, however trivial, it dulls the entire mechanic of what a player does.

These are all consequences, however trivial, of not defeating your enemy. What would you think of the game if none of these happened?

Asheron's Call did player death the right way IMO, as far as PvE is concerned. If you died, at least 2 items of the highest value would stay on your corpse, which would exist in the world 5 minutes for every level you were (so a level 24 characters corpse would last 2 hours). You were given a penalty in overall effectiveness, which was worked off by killing mobs. The tricky part was that there was, in the beginning, no mini-map indicator of WHERE your corpse was. So at times you'd need help from friends in actually finding it, as the landmass was extremely large in this game.

It was something you definitely worried about, and its effect was stacking (ie, several deaths in the same area would put you in pretty bad shape), but not such a setback that your progress as a character was pushed back, as in EQ's case.

"Look around you. We're all liars here, and every one of us is better than you" - PB

WoW was always designed as a casual friendly game from the get go. There never was a significant penalty for death. Despite all the people saying that risky games are the "best" WoW has been the most successful MMO since its release, taking players away from many of those more hardcore risky games. Those games also still exist. Many people talk about the risk in them like those games no longer exist, talk about how amazing they "were", and yet those games are still around. And here these people are, playing WoW, complaining that WoW isn't like those games of yesteryear with feature X that they loved.